Barnier will play his head this Wednesday at 4 p.m.

The debate followed by a vote on the motions of censure tabled by the left and the National Rally against the government of Michel Barnier will take place on Wednesday at 4 p.m., we learned from parliamentary sources on Tuesday.

The motion of censure tabled by the left-wing alliance of the New Popular Front has every chance of being adopted since the RN has announced its support. The text presented by Marine Le Pen’s party should conversely not be supported by the NFP. These motions come after Michel Barnier held his government accountable on Monday for the draft budget for Social Security by triggering article 49.3 of the Constitution.

“The fall of Barnier is complete,” proclaimed the head of deputies of La France Insoumise (LFI), a radical left group, Mathilde Panot.

Appointed on September 5, Michel Barnier will have lasted three months thanks to “support without participation of the RN” and, “what will bring him down is precisely that the RN will have stopped supporting him”, judged the socialist deputy Arthur Delaporte .

Michel Barnier has made numerous concessions and reversals on the efforts requested of the French in the face of the slippage of public finances, agreeing for example to suspend the reimbursement of medicines under pressure from the RN, the National Rally, but this was not enough.

“Censoring this budget is, unfortunately, the only way the Constitution gives us to protect the French from a dangerous, unjust and punitive budget,” Marine Le Pen decreed Tuesday on X.

Voting for censorship, “it’s our duty,” said Tuesday one of his main lieutenants, RN deputy Jean-Philippe Tanguy on Europe1/Cnews. “We are not going to entrust France’s purse strings to people who are incapable.”

Tuesday morning, ministers took turns on radio and television to raise the risk of “chaos”. “It is the country that we are putting in danger,” worried the Minister of the Economy Antoine Armand.

“The National Rally was above all looking for a pretext to bring the country to the ground, to vote for a motion of censure that they had in mind from the beginning,” said the Minister of the Budget, Laurent Saint-Martin, on RTL, castigating “the ‘irresponsibility’ of the far-right party.

“Do we really want chaos? Do we want an economic crisis which will affect the most vulnerable?”, launched the Minister of the Interior Bruno Retailleau on TF1, convinced that Michel Barnier can still manage to dismiss the motion of censure.

The adoption by the National Assembly of such a motion would be a first in France since 1962. Barnier’s government would then become the shortest in the history of the Fifth Republic.

To bring down the government, 288 deputies will have to vote for censure, a number well within the reach of an alliance of circumstances between the left and the RN.

If the executive falls, France would sink further into the political crisis created by the dissolution of the National Assembly by Emmanuel Macron in June, with the additional risk of a financial crisis linked to the markets’ confidence in the capacity of public authorities to borrow on the markets at low rates.

France is recording a serious slippage in its public deficit in relation to GDP this year, at 6.1% expected in 2024 and only plans to be able to respect the European rule of 3% again in 2029.

Michel Barnier had initially proposed 60 billion euros in budgetary effort in 2025.

Silent in public on this new crisis, Emmanuel Macron landed in Riyadh on Monday for a three-day state visit to Saudi Arabia. If the scenario of censorship is confirmed, it will be up to him to appoint a Prime Minister again.

The Senate must continue to debate the state budget on Tuesday.

For the deputies, “there is something extremely dizzying” in continuing to work in this way while censorship seems almost inevitable, socialist deputy Arthur Delaporte told AFP. “We rack our brains, we try to prepare for what comes next,” he added.